Ogre3D past experiments

Although i’m currently working on something different than Ogre, due to my past (but hopefully future) activities on it i’m receiving mails on why there are no more releases of my OgrePostFilterManager: the answer is really simple, there is no OgrePostFilterManager anymore because it has been completely integrated into the Ogre’s core under the name of Compositor and supporting scripting too. If you want a little story of it… read on!

For those who don’t know it, Ogre3D is an (highly) object-oriented graphic engine, abstracting specific APIs (DirectX|OpenGL) and OS-specificity providing an incredibly huge amount of freedom. From the ogre3d.org website:

OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. The class library abstracts all the details of using the underlying system libraries like Direct3D and OpenGL and provides an interface based on world objects and other intuitive classes.

The experiments thing i was talking in the title of this post concerns image-space postfiltering with Ogre: that’s it, being able to post-process the resulting frame with an image-space fragment program such a gaussian blur or a bloom.

At the time of experimenting (about 2 years ago) the thing was pretty interesting: there was no direct way to export a RenderMonkey’s script to the Ogre’s material format, moreover, there was also no direct way to write a GPU fragment program and lets it post-process the scene but the engine was undoubtedly capable of this: after all, i still wanted to try an HeatVision effect (ala “Predator’s movie”) in a real-life 3d application after having it running in RenderMoney; beside this there were no really specific reasons for which i would to start implement this, i simply realized it would be great to have it running in Ogre too and share the way i followed with other developers that might be in need of a similar thing for their own projects.

After some nights working on this i come up with a not-so-elegant solution, but the effect was running and this was the first step to a complete rewrite that followed about one year later: while the HeatVision demo was running pretty good, i wasn’t happy of it at all because setting up an image-space postfilter required too much work and still there was way too much code for it.

I abandoned this experiment quite early and resumed something like one year later, when RollBot’s was basically finished: having the old code as a reference i started the big rewrite.
The goal was, given a RenderMonkey’s script, being able to just use it in Ogre with the minor amount of code and not having to deal with quad, nodes and other geometry-related stuff.
In the meantime, Ogre obviously evolved so i had to remove some deprecated APIs i was using in the old code: i nicknamed the project OgrePostFilterManager and after a while i released some screenshots also explaining how the changes affected the amount of code one needed to write for having it running straight-out from RenderMonkey.
After some days i released the source code for it, adding some new effects to shows it off although supersuper really did a better job and wrote entire threads of post-processing filters, good work man!
Also i’ve to mention :wumpus: which helped me to get OgrePostFilterManager working in the “Dagon” release of Ogre, thank you much man.

I’m really happy to say that OgrePostFilterManager has been taken to the next level: :wumpus: added the whole scripting support and after some reworks it has been completely integrated into the Ogre’s core under the name of Compositor.

Really good time with you Ogre-guys, hope to be able to put my hands on Ogre soon.